“Corporate Video
Decisions,” your current exhibition at Michael Lett gallery in Auckland,
includes the covers of Corporate Video Decisions, a magazine from the 1980s
about the use of video technology in corporate culture, shown on flatscreen televisions,
and a series of printouts of the entire content Diligent Boardbooks’s website,
a paperless business software company based in Christchurch, NZ and New York.
I’m really fascinated by this double inversion of the way content is
communicated to us: the print magazine on monitors, the website printed out.
Can you talk a little bit about the exhibition and your use of inversion, as
well as languages of marketing and advertisement, as an aesthetic strategy?

Yeah,
I should say first that there is another layer of processing that is maybe
difficult to make out in the online photos of the exhibition. The print
magazine covers were actually photographed playing as jpegs on the LCD
3D-enabled televisions, then that
whole image is inkjet printed on canvas, twice—like two copies of each canvas—and
these are screwed together with aluminum tubing between the two canvasses in
each corner, spaced to mimic the dimensions of the monitor they depict. So you
have two canvasses with the same image on top of each other in place of the
monitors.

To
answer the question, for me, the exhibition’s aim is to present two snapshots
of different moments in the recent history of commercial video through looking
at these quite different pieces of ephemera—a magazine and a website. The
nature of video technology is such that a fast, controlled, obsolescence cycle
is systemic to its existence, and materials and formats come and go very
quickly. As this is the case, making an exhibition that has this fact built
into the way it is presented is for me very important. That is to say, the way
the content is presented should form a dynamic which helps describe the show’s
themes. Depicting the fickle material conditions of video via changing formats
of what is regarded at a certain moment to be contemporary ephemera (magazines,
websites), which are then presented through another fast shifting technology
(printing), one indicates these movements in the presentation structurally.

Contrasting
this ephemerality with the themes that are covered in the 80s magazine—trade
fairs, gender and minority equality, economic conditions, crisis culture,
generic products—(these topics clearly relate very well to our current moment
also), underlines the truism that while technology might change, certain issues
tend to be relevant for longer periods.

For
me the exhibition’s format highlights this tension between the permanent and
the impermanent, between vast material change and comparatively slow shifts in
life/work conditions.

On
the language of advertising, one has of course this ambivalent relationship to
it where one knows it’s manipulative, but its efficiency is seductive and
affective. One most likely follows this language’s logic implicitly in one’s
self. That is to say this way of communicating is unavoidable and is just
there. I am not sure if looking at this is really an aesthetic strategy. Even
just conversing can be considered to be a commercial act, and it’s not so easy
to attach a value to this. It is one’s life, after all.

Disruption and modification
of the commonplace visual experience form a large part of your work, from
superimposing images from television woven onto towels to the printing out of a
website. In Negative Headroom (2010), you look into a historical event—a
famous instant of transmission piracy where a hacker disrupted two broadcasts
of “critical” television host and Coca Cola endorser Max Headroom in the 1980s.
What do you think are the possibilities that these disruptions offer? How do
they change the way we think about information and the channels through which
we get it?

With
presenting objects and images in translated forms I want to bring certain
moments into focus in one place and time that were relevant in another. The Headroom
piracy incident was a beautiful “feedback” moment in network TV, a system that is/was
problematic in part because of its one-way broadcast from center to margins. In
one sense, the hacker dressed as Max Headroom foreshadows a YouTube answer to
this problem, in another sense it celebrates intervention just for the sake of
it, pranksterism. I thought this was an incident that would read well if
eulogized in an exhibition format. I chose to present images and objects that
underlined the aspects of this incident that I found relevant. This material
was not all deriving directly from the incident, some objects I felt related in
less direct ways—for example, I included an entire shop display for a new
Samsung TV, which in the last week of the exhibition, was unexpectedly stolen
from the exhibition venue, folding back on the logic of my presentation. The
how is the what, right? So this is where disruption and modification come in—it’s
a big part of the grammar available when relaying information through objects.
Information always comes through an experience of some kind, so it’s about what
tone a certain experience might bring to some information one is trying to
present. One example of how this plays out is the fact that the project
involved similar presentations in three very different venues—at a small German
kunstverein in Lüneberg, Art Basel Miami, and the Contemporary Art Museum St
Louis, which certainly highlighted this idea.

The works in your 2009
exhibition “Deep Sea Vaudeo” call attention to the television screen as an
object and consider the current disappearance of CRT televisions and the move to LED screens. In “Aquarium Paintings,” your exhibition
with Nick Austin in Berlin, you presented an inversion of Austin’s paintings
into videos. Your installation works are dense and very material. For someone
who deals a lot with digital culture and ideas around it, you seem to be very
interested in objects and the objects digital culture left behind. Is that so?

Yes,
for sure. When making exhibitions physical concerns are always central.
“Digital culture” is also obviously not immaterial. For me, it’s so much about
what this kind of culture leaves behind, it’s really about the stuff that
culture is made of. Part of what I am interested in is reinforcing the
relationship between the objects that are used within this cultural framework
or series of systems, with the structures and content that flows through those
objects. Objects in this way can operate as placeholders for certain moments in
time.

You seem to consume
enormous amounts of information that you then repurpose, modify, or edit as
part of your works and the texts accompanying your exhibitions. With
appropriation being such an important component of your work, what is your
approach to intellectual property, creative commons, and ideas of authorship?

This
is obviously really complex, something I am apprehensive to say something
definite about. These are clearly societal issues that not only have an impact
on the cultural field but also—most obviously—on politics and economics. I am a
big admirer of the creative commons effort. I also think that particularly in a
strictly legal context intellectual property appears to me as a very murky field.
I can say more experientially that it seems to me that we are at a moment in
time where making strict authorship distinctions seems sort-of forced, counter
to how life functions. It’s very tempting to think that if an idea enters one’s
mind it is a part of you and therefore on a human level as much yours as the
property of its source. This logic feels a bit like logic I’ve heard in
arguments in favor of graffiti—where the legal position is even clearer. The
constant process of recognizing things and understanding things we all have to
go through to live seems to me a process very close to aurthorship. To come
into contact with something is in a way to create it and I think this is
instinctually where my very loose approach to these matters in my work begins.
At this moment, as an artist, I act without a clear structure of how to deal
with these issues.

Age:

28.

Location:

Berlin.

How long have you been working creatively
with technology? How did you start?

No reply.

Describe your experience with the tools
you use. How did you start using them?

At art school.

Where did you go to school? What did you
study?

University of
Auckland in the Fine Arts Department in Auckland, New Zealand and then at the Staedelschule
Hochschule fuer Bildende Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. I studied visual
art.

What traditional media do you use, if
any? Do you think your work with traditional media relates to your work with
technology?

I don’t
totally identify with those divisions. But if I get what you mean, in those
terms I use a range of media, both traditional and more recent. Depends on the
project what the format becomes.

Are you involved in other creative or
social activities (i.e. music, writing, activism, community organizing)?

Yeah, I like
to go to a range of things often esp. where I live. Hard to draw a line…

What do you do for a living or what
occupations have you held previously? Do you think this work relates to your
art practice in a significant way?

I was once a fulltime
librarian. I still look to libraries a lot.

Who are your key artistic influences?

No reply.

Have you collaborated with anyone in the
art community on a project? With whom, and on what?

I was part of two
collectives when I lived in Auckland, Special Gallery and later Gambia Castle.
We worked to make it possible to make what we considered worthwhile exhibitions
happen where we were living. I have recently put on a number of parties with my
friend Yngve Holen. Often they have been staged around using photocopiers in
place of disco lights.

Do you actively study art history?

Yes

Do you read art criticism, philosophy, or
critical theory? If so, which authors inspire you?

Yes. My interests
change…

Are there any issues around the
production of, or the display/exhibition of new media art that you are
concerned about?